Random Horror Movies That Scarred You As A Kid But Are In No Way Scary To Watch As An Adult (14 items)

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  (#8) Children of the Corn

  • Linda Hamilton, Peter Horton, R. G. Armstrong, Courtney Gains, John Philbin, Julie Maddalena, John Franklin, Mitch Carter, Robby Kiger, Eric Freeman, Anne Marie McEvoy, Jonas Marlowe, Corey Frizzell, Teresa Toigo, Dan Snook, Patrick Boylan, Dennis Carl, Suzy Southam, D.G. Johnson, Elmer Soderstrom, David Cowen

  For some reason most of the Stephen King adaptations from the '80s and '90s just don't hold up. When they're held up against films like The Shining and Carrie most of the other adaptations feel like an afterthought. Children of the Corn definitely has a lot of stuff to scare a kid: spooky Amish boys, a corn monster, and ominous shots of corn, but there's nothing here for an adult to really be afraid of. 

  Admittedly no one wants to deal with large groups of children, but when you realize everything in this movie could have been avoided if the main characters had simply left town it makes the whole affair much more tedious. 
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  (#12) Phantasm

  • Angus Scrimm, A. Michael Baldwin, Reggie Bannister, Kate Coscarelli, Lynn Eastman, Bill Thornbury, Kathy Lester, Terrie Kalbus, Ralph Richmond, Dac Coscarelli, Kenneth V. Jones, Bill Cone, Mary Ellen Shaw, David Arntzen, Laura Mann, Susan Harper, Myrtle Scotton

  Phantasm is a film that taps perfectly into the subconscious of a 13-year-old. It has a surreal, dream-like logic that allows a super tall gravedigger to exist alongside a metallic ball covered in knives and an alien planet filled with dead bodies.

  The film's imagery is enough to give any young person nightmares, but once you age out of its target audience Phantasm loses any grasp it has over you and becomes something for another generation to discover. 
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  (#6) The Gate

  • Stephen Dorff, Kelly Rowan, Ingrid Veninger, Jennifer Irwin, Linda Goranson, Deborah Grover, Sean Fagan, Scot Denton, Louis Tripp, Christa Denton, Andrew Gunn, Carl Kraines

  The Gate is a nice piece of PG-13 horror from Canada about two kids who accidentally open a portal to Hell by digging a hole in the backyard. This movie definitely has all the hallmarks of a horror film that could freak out a child; there's a dead dog, kind of creepy looking monsters, and things that grab children from under their beds. 

  On reevaluation the movie is pretty cheesy, but it's a film that definitely turned fans onto the horror genre. 
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  (#7) A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

  • Patricia Arquette, Laurence Fishburne, Zsa Zsa Gábor, Robert Englund, Dick Cavett, Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon, Jennifer Rubin, Priscilla Pointer, Craig Wasson, Nan Martin, Brooke Bundy, Ken Sagoes, Ira Heiden, Penelope Sudrow

  When you were a kid was there anything scarier than Freddy Krueger? Throughout the '80s and '90s he was the de facto boogeyman for anyone under the age of 15, but who knew his movies would age so poorly? The first Nightmare on Elm Street film holds up similarly to a bad dream you can't shake, but the rest of the franchise plays like comedies when you rewatch them. 

  The best of the bunch is the third film in the series, Dream Warriors, remembered as a return to form after the abysmal Freddy's Revenge. Dream Warriors is probably the first Nightmare on Elm Street film you saw, and while it has some creepy imagery (track marks turning into hungry mouths, a kid's veins being ripped out of his arms, and the giant Freddy penis snake) it's also the first film to lean into the goofy nature of the character. 

  If you want to remember being scared of this movie it's best to never watch it again. 
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  (#4) Tremors

  • Kevin Bacon, Reba McEntire, Fred Ward, Ariana Richards, Michael Gross, Victor Wong, Bibi Besch, Tom Woodruff Jr., Tony Genaro, Conrad Bachmann, Charlotte Stewart, Robert Jayne, Sunshine Parker, Richard Marcus, John Goodwin, Finn Carter, John Pappas, Michael Dan Wagner

  There's a distinct possibility that even as a child you weren't frightened by this Kevin Bacon horror movie about giant sandworms traveling underground and eating anything that dared walk above them. The film definitely has all the calling cards of a horror film that could be scary: people get eaten, a dog is killed, and the heroes have to devise a clever way to defeat the villain(s). 

  If nothing else Tremors served as a way for young people to ease themselves into the horror genre even if it isn't all that scary. 
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  (#1) Child's Play

  • Brad Dourif, Catherine Hicks, Chris Sarandon, Dinah Manoff, Jack Colvin, Alex Vincent, Robert Minkoff, Ed Gale, Neil Giuntoli, Edan Gross, John Franklin, Juan Ramírez, Tommy Swerdlow, Alan Wilder, Michael Patrick Carter, Bo Kane, Ted Liss, Roslyn Alexander, Richard Baird, Leila Lee Olsen, Tommy Gerard, Jamie Gray, Tyler Hard, Michael Chavez, Lena Sack, Suaundra Black, Jana Twomey, Raymond Oliver, Aaron Osborne, Erin Munz

  What's scarier than one of your toys coming to life and trying to murder you? It turns out tons of things are scarier than this concept.

  Child's Play follows Chucky, a doll inhabited with the spirit of serial killer Charles Lee Ray. Throughout the film Chucky does some truly horrific things. He hits a woman in the face with a hammer, he bites another woman, and he even tries to possess the body of a child. 

  Unfortunately because all of this menace is coming from a doll it never goes beyond the level of interesting concept. While you were most likely scared of this movie as a kid, it's far from frightening decades later when your (probably) don't personally own an abundance of kids toys.

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